Ouch! A Slightly Different Approach to Helmet Safety…

I mean, your body can take a beating. If you fall, it’s usually from about 5 or 6 feet above the (hard) ground. Sometimes higher, if you happen to be jumping when you and the horse part company. And let’s face it, we don’t usually fall off while the horse is standing still. (Although, to be truthful, I can say that I’ve done that.) Most of the time when we experience an unintentional dismount, it’s at speed. Which makes the ground seem harder.

By the way, did you know that there are scales to evaluate the hardness of an object as it pertains to the bounce back of the object hitting it? I prefer using the Leeb Rebound Hardness test, myself.

Yep, from now on you can look at your falls as science experiments. You can even get a little doohickie called a schleroscope to measure the distance of your rebound after you hit the ground.

Even better, there’s even something called indentation testing that measure hardness based on the indentation left by an object hitting a surface. So, you can measure the hardness of the ground by the size of the crater you left behind when you landed.

But I digress. At least when you fall, you can point to your injuries with a sense of pride. Unfortunately, our equestrian passion often subjects us to less, uh, illustrious injuries – the broken toe from being stepped on, the bruised side from the bite of a girthy horse, or the scraped up leg from when Poopsikins tried to pry you off by using the nearest fence for leverage.

I give you my most recent Stupid Horse-Related Injury: The Self-Imposed, Helmet-Induced Nose Job. Sadly, I was nowhere near a horse when this happened. I was just getting ready to tack up, grabbing my saddle and helmet from the top rack, and the helmet bounced off the bottom rack, rebounded upwards and the brim smacked me right in the bridge of the nose. BAM!!!!!

I saw stars, and darn near went to my knees. Bled like a stuck pig, too. This is what it looks like 3 days later. Lovely shade of Spring-like yellow, don’t you think?

I’ll be the first to tell you, helmet safety is VERY IMPORTANT!!! Those suckers can hurt!

5 Responses

Riding my trainer’s baby the other day, the wind knocked over the bright green oxer standards right to the left of where we were jumping. They CRASHED to the ground and the horse slid right out from under me! lol. Luckily I had on a helmet. 😉

My daughter suffered the dreaded stirrup iron to the upper lip catastrophe. Being only 8 or 9 years old, she was (and still is) fairly short. She had the “webber” type of stirrup leathers and the irons cannot be run up on those. As she pulled the saddle off, the iron launched and smacked her squarely in the middle of her upper lip, just under her nose and gave her a lovely gash. As it healed and scabbed over, it looked like she had a little Hitler mustache. She still has a scar, absolutely in the center of her face…yet another hazard related to the equine habit.

I’ve done things like that. Once I had just put my kid’s pony back out in the field and still had said leadshank in hand. Decided to quickly clean up our “pile” and threw it in the manure pile with leadshank still in hand. Big brass buckle hit me square in the nose. Yup, saw the stars whole 9 yards. Drove self home holding onto a kleenex to stop the bleeding. I was lucky though it didn’t break my glasses. Still have a scar from it 3 years later…oh the things we injure ourselves doing.

Years ago, when I was in Pony Club, my friend’s brother got knocked out by his helmet falling out of his locker on to the very top of his head. The whole crew of us got dragged to the hospital while the mom tried to explain what had happened…